With the national economy in recession, the importance of producing a well-educated and well-qualified American workforce has grown.
In his remarks at the closing session of the Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth, President Barack Obama emphasized “the urgent need for more effective worker training.”
“As tough as this recession is, as tough as the job market may be,” he said. “We need to double down on our education investment.”
With higher education playing an ever-increasing role in preparing students for their future careers, colleges, universities and employers are grappling with the best methods for training students to excel after graduation.
According to Kelly Cleary, senior associate director of Penn Career Services wmployers can be certain of the abilities of the University’s graduates because of the “rigor of a Penn degree,”
She said that on-campus recruiting has declined nationwide because of the recession, but companies continue to come to Penn.
“Penn students are exceptionally well-prepared, partially because of the pre-professional environment,” she said.
“The proof comes from what our students end up doing after they graduate.”
Professional school or college
The biggest contributor to this pre-professional environment on campus is perhaps the Wharton School.
According to a survey by Penn Career Services, Wharton students who graduated in 2009 received an average starting salary of $59,852. This figure is more than $11,000 higher than the starting salary offers to new college graduates nationwide reported in the 2009 fall survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
In contrast, Penn students who graduate from the College of Arts and Sciences started with an average salary of $46,288 — about $2,400 less than the national average.
This discrepancy in salaries is indicative of a decades-long shift in higher education away from liberal arts colleges to professional institutions such as Wharton, which produce workers with more readily employable skills.
In his 1990 paper titled “Are We Losing Our Liberal Arts Colleges?” University of Virginia professor David Breneman detailed the reduction of institutions that the public perceives as liberal arts institutions from 540 to just 212.
That number has further dwindled in the past nineteen years to 137, according to a July 9 article on the web site Inside Higher Ed entitled “The Case of the Disappearing Liberal Arts College.”
“My conclusion from this interesting, but unexpected, research is that the liberal arts college is in much greater peril than I thought it was,” Breneman wrote in his paper. “It is surviving, but only by changing and becoming something else — for want of a better term, a small professional college.”
But Debra Humphreys, spokeswoman for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, argued that an ideal education is not so dichotomous.
“Those two categories are no longer as distinct as they once were,” she said. “Engineers need to know how to communicate well. English majors need to know how numbers work and how statistics work.”
The Death of the Liberal Arts
With this decline in the liberal arts, the AAC&U; is instead advocating for what it calls a “liberal education” in addition to a professional degree.
“Every student, no matter what they major in, really does need a liberal education, which is different from a major in arts and sciences,” Humphreys said. “It’s more a matter of this broader set of skills that students need.”
Along with specific professional skills, students need the “general competencies [to] communicate, think, read, write, use technology, be flexible [and] think critically,” agreed Marcus Kolb, program officer at the Lumina Foundation for Education .
His organization that aims to increase the number of students with postsecondary credentials from 39 percent to 60 percent by 2025.
“Good communicators, good writers [and] good thinkers transcend degrees and disciplines,” he said.
Real World Integration
Regardless of the kinds of degrees students receive, employers and recent college graduates said workforce readiness comes not only from education, but also from experience.
A 2006 survey conducted by the AAC&U; entitled “How Should Colleges Prepare Students To Succeed In Today’s Global Economy?” found that colleges needed “to increase their emphasis on integration and application of skills and knowledge in real-world settings and situations.”
Humphreys said this shift could be seen in an increase in the number of colleges and universities requiring senior projects or community-based research projects.
“[The] trend is toward the real-world application kind of approach — undergraduate research where students are participating in real research teams,” she said. “For these larger skills we’re trying to teach students, more colleges are moving toward project-based assignments and qualitative assessments for these assignments.”
The private sector is also doing its part to help students gain experience while still in school.
AT&T; is investing $100 million in an initiative called Aspire, aimed to decrease the high school dropout rate by preparing college and workforce readiness, awarding funds to educational programs and sponsoring a job shadowing initiative for 100,000 students.
“Investing in a well-educated workforce may be the single most important thing we can do to make sure America can be a leader,” said Dan Langan, a spokesman for AT&T.;
With the November unemployment rate at 10 percent, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job market is a volatile environment, but Penn graduates may be at an advantage.
“The demands of the workplace have risen,” Humphreys said, “[but] higher education has always prepared students for the next stage of their lives.”
